Fate Fell Short This Time
by Hisako Kojima
Summary: The seconds, minutes, and hours of fate work in mysterious ways. This time, this rebirthing, he meets them. This life, this abomination, she loses them all together. AU post Silver Millennium.


Warning: Alternate Universe. The Silver Millenium happened as it did. The rebirth happens differently.

A/N: Not normally a fan of Author's Notes; there is a long one at the end that is more of a "chat" nature than anything.

This particular note is mostly to introduce the fact that while I am using the North American names (i.e. Darien, Serena, etc), I do use "Serenity" and "Endymion" to refer to their past lives as opposed to their current lives. As far as Rei goes, I am using the Romanji spelling because I feel that it is truer to the character as opposed to adopting the Japanese culture. That being said, Amy will still be Amy, Mina will still be Mina, and Lita is still Lita. When it comes up, anyway.

Even with all of that, this story is going to be…different. It's a complete AU starting with the rebirth of the Senshi/Scouts, Shitennou/Generals, and all involved. Let's just say that things go differently this time.

Sorry for the long author's note! Please enjoy!

—Hisako

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Sailor Moon; I don't own the rights or properties. I have no intentions of making money, nor do I wish to make money off of the story imagined, quite creatively, by someone else. This is, however, my story based off of someone else's wonderful idea. Enjoy!

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

He is seven the first time he dreams of her. His child's mind almost can't process the shadowy figure he sees—he remembers his mother in a vague way, in as so much that he is a seven-year-old staring at a regal, darkly-lit woman. She is holding her hand out to him.

_"Endymion!"_ she whispers urgently.

He cries out in his sleep and _reaches_—if he could only_ touch_ her, maybe he would wake up—she could tell him _everything_; he just _knows_ it.

"Darien, shh! It's okay!" another voice tries to calm him.

He blearily opens his eyes with tears on his face. Another boy is carefully holding him. He thinks it is probably Jedidiah.

"But—" Darien starts. He is interrupted by a small light coming on, and he blinks owlishly. It is as if the dream has been dispelled, and now he can barely recall the safety and warmth he felt in his slumber-filled vision.

With the light on, Darien knows that it is definitely Jedidiah, but he and the other children mostly call him Jed for short. Jed is only a little older than Darien himself, with soft, wavy blonde hair and eyes as blue as the hottest flame.

Darien is still scrawny at seven, with mussed dark hair that he uses as shield from the world he doesn't want to acknowledge. He can't remember the accident, he can't remember his parents—he is only left with a hollow ache in the acknowledgement of the stark fact that his life isn't supposed to be like this.

Jed snaps his fingers in front of Darien, who has curled into a whimpering ball of frustration. "You'll wake the sisters," he warns. He is older enough (and has also been there longer) that Darien doesn't protest, and tries to quiet his soft sounds of emotional turmoil.

"My _name_ is _Endymion_," he protests to Jed as quietly as he can manage, and rubs his pajama sleeve across his nose.

Jed holds him and they lie back together on the narrow bed. "Alright, Endy. Just…please, be quiet—for both our sakes."

Darien acquiesces, but mostly because Jed agreed to the sudden name change. He quiets, exhausted by his dream and irritated by the emotional impact of memories he can't recall.

Jed strokes his back. His old mom used to do it (when she wasn't all messed up on whatever she found before she came home; he doesn't know where she went all the time). "It's okay, Endy—my mom always called me her little piece of Jadeite. But Jed's close enough."

They don't wake the sisters, and Jed becomes the only person that Darien will talk to. The sisters don't like it, but a year later, Darien is adopted and it doesn't matter as much.

This time, Darien knows why it hurts so much. He waves reluctantly to Jed, dragging his feet and his small sack of belongings, and lets his new parents push him into the car.

There is a blonde boy with brown eyes in the backseat, and a red-headed toddler with green eyes in a booster seat in the middle. The boy is about his age, Darien thinks, but isn't sure.

"I'm Andrew!" the blonde boy says happily. "I'm your new brother!" He pokes the red-headed toddler. "And this is Lizzie…but she's a _girl_." He whispers this as if it is the most annoying thing in the world.

Andrew looks enough like Jed that it eases Darien just the smallest bit before he resolves to write to Jed, _no matter what_.

"I'm Darien," he responds politely, and the car pulls away.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The next time Darien sees her, it is because he is daydreaming during history class. It irritates him, because at the age of twelve, girls are as much of a mystery as his life, and he hates being distracted from the task at hand. History, however, is also hard for him when his own is so obstructed. Math is cut and dry, and always has a right or wrong answer.

The girl is calling him Endymion again, and the shadowy light she is shrouded in is hardly enough to hide the silver-gold of her hair. Her hand is reached out; he keeps his own to himself this time, as if in penance for her absence.

A classmate pokes him with a pencil to snap him out of it—the classmate is Nathaniel, a new student freshly transplanted from France. Nate is easier for everyone to pronounce; his father is a businessman that seems to be fairly absent the majority of the time.

At the very least, when it comes time to go home and Darien is meeting up with Andrew (and Lizzie, much to their embarrassment and chagrin), Nate is always sliding into a sleek black car with a man too distant and aloof to be his father.

Nate stares at him with condescending (but curious) blue eyes. His hair is curly, brown, and rarely stays in the ponytail that the school forces him to adopt (since he refuses to cut it).

"Who is Serenity?" Nate asks amusingly.

"No one," Darien mutters, and struggles to pay attention to seventh grade history.

"Your girlfriend, no?" Nate responds, despite the waves of "_leave me alone_" rolling off of Darien in waves. The French boy's voice is accented, and more than a few girls have swooned over it (even though really, the boys in their class are either dumbfounded or cocky around the girls, without any knowledge of what to _do_ about it).

The teacher frowns at both of them, but continues seamlessly with the lecture. The gaze from the authority figure is, however, clear.

"Stop talking to me; I'm trying to pay attention," Darien whispers snappishly.

Nate never knows when to stop; it is a character trait that has gotten him into trouble quite a bit. "It must be difficult, when a girl so beautiful makes you say her name—what was the dream, I wonder?"

It is enough talking to get them both a detention for class disruption.

In their eighth year, Nate informs Darien that his parents have decided to stay permanently. They somehow remain friends after.

Darien thinks it is because Nate listened seriously about the dream-girl—Nate wanted to figure out who she could be, or what it meant, as opposed to outright-laughing. Nate also hears about the dream where Darien heard his real name (no one has taken "Endymion" seriously, not even Andrew, and Darien stopped receiving letters from Jed nearly three years ago), and takes to calling Darien "Endy" as an inside-joke.

Nate slowly opens up during eighth grade a bit. He recounts, as they study for their eighth year finals, that his parents only decided to relocate permanently because in France, Nate has been kicked out of more schools for fighting than the number of years he has been alive.

Here, though, Nate feels calmer—what he refrains from telling Darien is that he feels calmer because of his newfound friend.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Darien and Nate are in their tenth year when they get into a bad enough fight that both their parents decide to enroll them into a new-age-style summer camp for "troubled" teens. The camp is six weeks long, and the fact that it will be their _entire_ summer break is nearly punishment enough.

Though they go together, Nate ends up split from him early on. Darien finds the animal clinic more calming, while Nate prefers the company of the stars.

It is more like a long-term hobby camp, where Nate and Darien still eat their meals together, but in between, Nate is nose-deep into astronomy and Darien is eyeballing veterinary medicine until his eyes swim with possibilities for his own future.

In the third week, Darien meets a new horse. The majority of the vet clinic at the camp is devoted to rehabbing horses, something that the camp advisors insist is good for delinquent teens. The horse is a white Arabian named Helios, and Darien is the only one that is able to get near him.

Helios has a benign tumor on the forehead, obvious and distorted beneath his mane, almost like a horn more than a growth.

Helios is special, Darien thinks. He grooms the downy growth of mane that the vet doctor had shaved a week ago when the tumor had been removed. Darien feels something odd, like remorse, and stares at the horse's golden eyes. There is something like sadness there; Darien feels it as surely as he knows that his _real_ name is Endymion.

"It's okay, Helios," Darien clucks, and the horse nuzzles into his hand for the lump of sugar, "It'll grow back."

He only tells Nate—Darien _swears_ that he had heard a young voice tell him _thank you_.

The voice stays with him for a long time—he recalls when he was so very young himself that he once cried on the shoulder of another boy as lost as he.

Though Helios is an oddly comforting presence, he never stops wondering what happened to Jed.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

It is eleventh grade now, and Darien and Nate are hard to studying, though it is for different reasons. Nate wants to be an astrophysicist, while Darien is still drawn to the medical arts. No animal has ever quite impacted him as Helios had, so Darien settles for being a doctor instead.

They both join an after school club called "Science Olympiad", and while most of it is dedicated to showy presentations of various chemical reactions, Darien and Nate both find it to be a nice addition to their educational resume, and use it to various advantages.

Mostly, however, it is because while Darien understands math in ways most people do not, he still needs a little help from Nate for calculus. Nate is just as hopeless with biology, because the math is not as apparent or deep, and needs assistance with understanding the importance of microbiology within a discipline as astronomy. Neither realize how the sciences are layered, and use each other for help while hiding within the Science Olympiad to avoid asking others.

They are both buried in studying when two boys their age want to study with them. Nate only grunts an affirmative, and clears away a portion of the lab table, drawing notes back to him.

One of the boys is much taller than many of the teens their age, with dark, foreign skin and hair the color of the moon. Darien studies him for a moment, because from what he knows of genetic disorders, this boy looks a prime example of some pigmentation disorder (but only in the hair).

The boy looks at him. "We were studying, I thought?" he inquires, and his voice is unkind.

"Sorry," Darien mumbles, and turns back to his cellular biology text.

The other boy, however, sits down with words already on his lips and a certain excitement of sociability in his bright green eyes. "I'm Zeke," he tries, the hope of conversation apparent on his face.

Nate bites back a response visibly, and keeps his head to his books. Darien crinkles his eyes in a sort of smile, but only because he doesn't want to ignore the boy all together.

Zeke, however, doesn't seem to be annoyed or aware of the brush-off. Instead, he looks at what Nate is working on (an equilibrium reaction that has several answers), and coughs loudly enough that it is definitely a sign of "_look here; I can help maybe_".

Nate looks up irritably. "Can I _help_ you with something?"

Zeke is playing with his hair, curling the dark blonde-red tip around his fingers in a motion that speaks more of habit than flirtation or nerves. "It's sulfurous acid, not sulfuric."

A furrow works its way between Nate's eyebrows. "Excuse me?"

"The original problem," Zeke says cheerfully, and points to the very top of the paper where Nate's notes are scrawled, "Calls for sulfurous acid, not sulfuric. You added an oxygen atom at some point."

Darien is interested at this point, because Nate rarely makes mistakes—but sure enough, the original problem clearly states Nate's error.

Zeke's white-haired companion makes a chiding noise in the back of his throat. "It's not nice to point out people's typos, Ezekiel."

Zeke snorts. "I was trying to _help_. You'd tell me if I lost a negative sign somewhere in an equation—he just gained an oxygen atom at some point. All numbers look the same at some point!"

Darien can't contain a choked-off laugh at that point.

Nate is erasing furiously, and already re-attempting. He doesn't acknowledge the mistake, but he doesn't appear to be angry either.

"I'm Darien. This is Nate," Darien finally offers, looking at Zeke and his friend.

Zeke offers a hand, which Darien accepts. The red-head shakes it vigorously. "So cool! Kaleb won't let us really talk to _anyone_; it's like I've told him—we're here on foreign exchange, why the _hell_ should we not be friendly?"

Kaleb sighs, and the look on his face says exasperation. It makes him look less aloof and younger than before. "Because we're here to learn and receive better education, not make friends, Zeke."

Zeke shrugs off the rebuke easily. "It doesn't mean we can't get to know a person or two. This club is good for our high school experience, but so are _friends_."

Darien feels like he's seeing a private moment in a way, because this is clearly an argument the two teenage boys have had before. He looks at Nate for a minute, but his brown-haired friend is still reworking the equilibrium problem.

"We should go to this arcade I know about," Darien says, mind made up in an instant. "My brother works there, and we can get some sodas or something while we study."

Kaleb looks like he would rather eat dirt. "Zeke and I are fine."

Zeke snorts, and turns his full attention to Darien, who feels as if a leprechaun is staring at him like a pot of gold. "An _arcade_? Your brother works there?"

"He's not really my brother," Darien hears himself say, and can practically feel Nate's pencil scratch a line of surprise into paper. "His family adopted me."

Zeke scoots his chair over to Darien's side. "We should go to the arcade. Kaleb can study for _hours_, and I could use a soda." His voice is nearly sympathetic, but there is a tonal quality to it that Darien can't find pity in.

"What do you say, Nate?" Darien asks.

Nate throws his pencil onto the paper. "You were right," he spits at Zeke, who looks confused at the vehemence.

"I was just trying to _help_," Zeke responds.

Kaleb is watching intently. "Problem, _Nathaniel_?"

Nate looks at Kaleb like he is sizing him up and debating the worth of a fight. "A soda sounds good," Nate says instead, agreeing to Zeke's obvious inclination to be friends.

Zeke jams a fist into the air. "Sodas and the arcade then? We can keep studying there, Kaleb, I _promise_."

Zeke is clearly younger than the three of them; perhaps in ninth grade. His attitude, if not the slight traces of baby fat still on his face, say that much.

Kaleb looks at Zeke as if he couldn't deny him anything though, and grudgingly gathers his school work together in a sign of agreement. "Fine. We'll go."

Nate and Zeke are discussing equilibrium reactions ahead of them. Kaleb stands back with Darien, quiet and calculating.

The walk is a fairly long one from their high school, and Darien finds himself feeling somewhat comforted by Kaleb's lack of talking.

It isn't until they are nearly to the arcade that Kaleb breaks his silence, and when the white-haired teen does so, it is so earth-shattering that Darien nearly drops to his knees—he hits the wall instead.

"What happened to Jed?" Kaleb asks, and peers at him imploringly.

Darien struggles, reaches out—and is grateful for the stone brick against his fingers. "Excuse me?" he stutters.

Kaleb waits until he is sure that Zeke and Nate are inside the arcade, and then turns his gaze back to Darien. "What happened to Jed?"

Darien feels his fingers scraping against the rough wall. "He stopped writing me," is what comes out instead of "how the hell did you know about Jed".

Kaleb stares at him, and it is an uncomfortable feeling, as if Darien is being taken apart from the inside out and inspected for flaws. "You should find him." Kaleb leaves him standing there, and enters the arcade to find Zeke and Nate.

Darien stands against the wall, his heart and blood thundering in his ears worse than any storm he has ever experienced. He feels like something is grasping at him, something is calling to him. Unbidden, an image of a dimly-lit woman screaming his name comes to his mind, and the memory is drenched in desperation and sorrow as bright as nothing else he has suffered, save the still-lost memory of losing his parents. She is crying, she is wearing a white dress with gold embroidery, she has silver-blond hair that is longer than he thought possible, she is wailing his name in absolute horrified sorrow, she is bleeding, she is _dying_—

Something hits his head, and he is, all at once, snapped away from the sudden onslaught of a memory he can now barely recall. It didn't hurt, whatever it was, and he bends over to scoop up the offending object.

It is an exam paper, crinkled into a little ball, and he unfolds it to inspect it. There is a sharp, glaring, _30%_, written across the top in undeniably red marker. He stares at it a moment before inspecting the first name: _Serena_.

He looks around, but only sees a hunched figure with long blond hair in a junior-high uniform standing several feet away. She is swinging a black briefcase, and her head is hung down as if the weight of the world is on her shoulders.

In a moment of impulse, he _knows_ that this is her test. He throws it back. "Watch your littering!" he snaps, and notices the odd little buns she has her hair twisted into. "Meatball-head!" he adds as quickly as he can.

The girl turns and glares at him to where the test is crumpled into a ball at her feet. "They're buns, not meatballs, you idiot."

Darien snorts, and points to the test, glad for something to focus on besides the vicious images of bloodshed he had seen moments ago. "Who's calling who an idiot, _idiot_?"

The violently red _30%_ is still visible, despite the paper's crumpled state, and the girl swoops over to pick up the paper. Her face is the color of a tomato, and she glares at him like she might hit him.

"You're a jerk," she says with more vehemence than he thought a girl her size could manage, and turns sharply into the arcade.

Darien rolls his eyes, but doesn't enter the arcade to join his friends right away. He tries to recollect the vision from a few minutes before the 30% girl had interrupted him, but he comes up with nothing. Lost and reluctant, he enters the small arcade/diner that his adopted brother, Andrew, works at (and his adopted parents own), and joins Zeke, Nate, and Kaleb at a table.

His heart isn't into studying now, and he glances at Andrew, who mans the counter with a certain ease and friendliness that Darien sometimes envies. There is an unfamiliar pull and twist when he sees the blonde girl, Serena, talking closely to Andrew over a hot fudge sundae that Andrew has produced quickly and with sympathy.

Andrew brings their sodas by, and sidles up to Darien in the booth. "How's the cellular biology?" he asks with twinkling brown eyes.

Darien grins at him; Andrew isn't his brother, but you don't live with someone for most of your life and not know their habits and moods. "How's business calculus?" Darien responds smugly.

Andrew's fair skin only reddens a little. "It's voo-doo calculus, I tell you. It just doesn't _work_ the way it should."

Darien laughs, and tries to ignore the hunched blonde girl at the bar. He finds it difficult to pay attention to his studies, knowing that he may have made the icing on the cake of her horrible day. He doesn't understand how, right away, that he _knows_ that her day had been terrible.

He does know that he's failed a test or two enough that having someone call him an idiot right after was enough to make him want to just drown in the bathtub.

Darien sighs, and decides to try and cheer her up by buying her one of the little plastic flowers that Andrew's parents keep by the registers of the arcade. He has just hidden the plastic rose into the pocket of his school uniform jacket when someone settles next to Serena at the bar.

The guy beside of Serena isn't anything abnormal, really, but the mop of dirty-blonde hair and bright blue eyes (_bluer than the hottest fla—_) make Darien grip the plastic rose harder inside his jacket. The boy at the bar is stroking Serena's back, and simply listening to her talk. His motions are brotherly, they are…familiar in a way that Darien isn't always familiar with himself.

Darien sits back with his friends, pointedly ignoring Zeke's curious stare. Kaleb and Nate are debating whether physics or chemistry came first, and Zeke is only paying attention to Darien in a rare, quiet moment of observation.

The boy at the bar is dirty, and wears a distinctive vest that clearly states his station as a construction worker. His hands are filthy, with dirt creased into his knuckles and smudges of oil and grease across his face and white tee-shirt. Serena is huddled around her sundae as if someone might steal it. The boy next to her seems to try, but she slaps his hand with a familiarity that makes Darien grind his teeth, and he isn't sure why.

Darien is nearly ready to excuse himself when Serena fumbles at the bar for something, and then takes off for the exit as if hell, personified, is on her heels. He frowns, rubbing a finger over his lip.

"Got a crush, Darien?" Zeke asks suddenly.

"The photosynthesis equation on your binder is wrong," Darien responds instead, and, without knowing why, runs away after Serena. Something aches in his chest, something deep and hard, and it makes his limbs feel like lead. There is a voice in his head, one that reminds him of both Helios and Jed at the same time, and he isn't able to deny the accusation:

_We came back wrong. Something is wrong!_

His head is pounding with the words, his blood is suddenly vacuum-pressured and flushing through his body without an outlet. His head hurts—

_It's all _wrong_._

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The winds are fierce and biting, and yet, still, Ava Benjamin fights her way through the cold and ice to a glacier cave within the Arctic Circle. None of her friends back home were _ever_ going to believe these pictures!

She snaps happily with her digital camera, her copper-red hair bundled securely beneath a ski-cap and goggles secured over her eyes. She is rejoiced with this discovery; she can now e-mail her advisors back home and tell them she has finally found the gravity anomaly!

Ava continues to snap pictures, answering to curiosity's call to find more, to seek more, to figure it _out_. She has been lost her entire life; she has found something that makes _sense_. The teal-green ice cave is like a different world, and she pauses briefly to wonder what this might mean for astrobiology.

An ominous creaking sound makes her stop for a moment. It sounds like ice accommodating something new, like fabric stretching to occupy a new figure that it is not quite used to. She looks around her, and realizes that her excitement has drawn her deeper than she wanted to be. The ice might not be stable down here; she needs to head back before—

There is only a flash of pain, a sudden streak of black—and then _nothing_. It is simply…

It is a force, a push of negativity. She is trapped, she is falling, she is everything that she never was, she is everything she could have been with the right power, the right circumstance…

But she is still nothing she wanted to be, and howls. The wail is animalistic, and it collapses pieces of the glaciers.

_Yes…yes…you remember. You realize. You know what you must do_.

Ava blinked; the tears on her face had turned to ice. She struggled against the void filling her heart, her mind, her soul—

And then—nothing.

And then—_he left her_.

And then—_no!_

And then—_Why me? WHY ME!? Hasn't it been enough?_

And then—_he was beautiful, with his eyes as blue as the sea and his hair as dark as volcanic rock; he only rubbed her hair like a sister—_

Then—_Leave me alone! I just want to be normal! I found this cave; this is MY discovery!_

And, whimpering, lost, alone, pitifully—_This is wrong…not like this…please—_

A voice laughed, high-pitched and low and everything in between all at the same time. Cold, calculating, piercing…

_This is how it will be. It was wrong _before_. Now, this time…this time, it will be _my_ time._

Finally—_it could have been me._

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Author's Notes: So, I've been beating this idea around for a bit. I hope I can do it justice; I've got pages of notes XD I'm a long-time fan of the show (I remember when they had newly-translated the SuperS series, and thought "wtf, I've never seen cousins like that outside of…well…HERE, but WHAAAA, NO" ) and I also have a lot of the original manga (translated English, sure…back when Darien was calling Serena "Cow-tails" lol).

That being said, most of my Sailor Moon canon is both manga and anime inspired. I try not to let it contradict each other. This, however, _is_ a complete re-imagining of the rebirth of the Sailor Scouts and the Shitennou/Generals. The Silver Millenium happened as it did (I tend to stray towards the Manga version on that one).

Still with me? Cool! Thanks for sticking around this long!

As usual, this story is inspired by the Shitennou/Senshi picture that Takeuchi had drawn, but never used as a story-line, but…well. Things go differently when they're reborn. It is also inspired by debating with a friend about the fact that Queen Metallia had 1,000 years to stew about what went wrong during the Silver Millenium, so far as her attempted takeover went.

The only head-canon part is that Ava Benjamin is Beryl, but I'm pretty sure all of you knew that ::grins::

Well…let's spin this new, shall we?

Hope you enjoyed!

-Hisako-


End file.
